Does Not Play Well With Others

I do not. But one of the benefits of maturity is that I don’t feel bad about that anymore.

In the final analysis, I’m just a little too ruthless to work with almost everyone else. Someone says something about a deadline, someone says something about an objective, and I start doing this thing most other people find weird: planning. But, it turns out, other people like to talk more and explore options. Which is fine, except that people seem to want to do more of that as that deadline approaches and more planning still needs to be done. And I suspect that much of the world is utterly sanguine about that, but it fills me with panic about last minute adjustments and having to put off the rest of my life in order to make something work.

Well, as of May, I’m done with all of that.

I do a little visualization exercise in the mornings, and I realized a few days ago that I put myself in group settings where I haven’t felt comfortable before. This may be my fantasy – visualizations are sometimes just that – that I’ll be able to feel like I belong in those places, but lately I don’t like that fantasy. I’m now starting to picture myself alone in settings where I’ve enjoyed myself, or with people I know I feel good with (aka family and friends). And that feels like something I can make a reality.

Qigong

 My heart started bothering me again on December 30, 2020. I don’t usually put down dates like that, but I remember it very well because it was the day before NYE and I was visiting one of my daughters at work with my husband and sons. Too much excitement? Maybe. I don’t know, but it did seem clear to me that day, and when I was exhausted after the next episode, that all of the workout plans I’d been pursuing were out the door for the next few months. (This is part of what I mean about trying on new personalities, or in this case trying to fit back into old ones.)

So I’ve been doing something I wanted to anyway and have been focusing on walking and qigong. (Yes, I’m also drinking tea maybe once a week, and coffee never; that last part isn’t hard at all.) I love walking, and since reading The Nature Fix I’ve been trying to expose myself to as much green as I can; I’m fortunate to live in a part of Boston where that’s easy.

As much as I dabbled into qigong before, I found I really loved Lee Holden’s approach, and after using his practices on Hoopla A LOT, I treated myself and bought four of his dvds. (I’m old-fashioned, I know; I like to be able to use things that don’t depend on whether I have a good wi-fi connection.) And I’m using them regularly (well, three of them; the fourth feels a little too light). And I love it. It focuses my breathing, goes at the right pace to allow me to move into a flow, and I break a little bit of a sweat. It’s not magic – I don’t always emerge from a practice feeling all of my troubles fall away – but it does make me feel better without making me feel worse. (People who work out regularly may know what I mean.)

The big question: do I get another DVD?

Reading

 I’ve been busy reading quite a bit. Finally finished the Poppy Wars trilogy, and that’s all I’m going to say. Also got to read Scott Anderson’s fantastic The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War--a Tragedy in Three Acts, and before that I finished America for Americans. I also dug into two books I’ve had on my To Be Read list for a while, The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America's Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality and New Worlds for All:Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. When I finally dug into those, I wondered why I’d waited so long: not only were their lengths very manageable (less than 400 pages), but they were so good. Weirdly for me, I acquired We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State almost as soon as I heard about it, in part because it’s a subject one of my sons has been obsessed with for about two years now. It was good, but by the second-to-last chapter I felt like the author had made his point and I was just waiting for it to end.

 

 

Now finally digging into Beasts Made of Night, which is a needed departure from some of the fiction I’ve been reading recently, and trying to get through To Hold Up the Sky, Cixin Liu’s latest release of short stories. My reading goal this year is to get through my library Holds list (seven items as of now), then my For Later shelf (nineteen items as of now, but two of them are movies and three I can't touch until the libraries are open to the public again), and then move onto the books sitting on my piano, including a re-read of The Fifth Season, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, Ken Liu’s latest short story collection, and Monkey, one of the many versions of Journey to the West. Ah, but then there is the newest Brunetti, Ken Liu’s third installment of the Dandelion Dynasty, and most especially, Fonda Lee’s Jade Legacy. Twenty-six books to look forward to. This should be a good year.

Tidying

While my husband read through the last chapter of a book that was, frankly, beginning to exhaust me, I decided to tidy (or re-tidy) my space. Amazing how much we can fit into relatively small spaces; when I was done about 90 minutes later, I was giving away two bags of clothing and had generated a bag of garbage. Mind you, this was only my space, not our shared spaces. Those hauls are always more impressive.

Why re-tidy? Shouldn’t you only have to do it once? Perhaps, but apparently I like to try on different hobbies and personalities more, and while I’m pretty ruthless in some ways, it can be difficult to discard things people have given me that I don’t want.

Always a good exercise to go through, especially when it results in a little more calm and clarity.

Progress!

...on leftovers and pantry items, but take the wins where you can.

The lentil soup and vegan chili I made a few days ago are now all gone. Yes! (Anyone who has ever batch cooked and then had the food stare back at them for a week -- or more -- will understand my excitement.) My husband helped, thankfully, and we both decided that the next batch of lentil soup should have more kick to it, both as far as salt and spice. Easy to fix.

As promised, I took the squash that had been sitting on my kitchen table for a while and turned it into a pie. The original intention had been a pudding, but when my husband saw the vegan gluten-free pie crusts I had in the freezer, he made the case for pie. This was very easy. I took the whole squash -- barely medium, closer to small -- stabbed it a few times, put it in a pan with a little water, and baked it at 400 for about 40 minutes. I let it cool over night, then cut it in half, scooping out the seeds and pulling away the peel. That went into a blender with some salted cashews (that was what I had), water, 2 tablespoons of cornstarch, about a cup of pitted dates, fresh ginger (because I didn't have dried), and then the usual suspects for pumpkin pie spice, including cinnamon, nutmeg (my absolute favorite), and cloves. This went into said frozen pie crust and baked for 50 minutes in a 375 degree oven, and after a few hours of cooling was delicious. I was worried that this wouldn't set up well, but the texture is perfect.

Realized this morning that I was running low on my homemade yogurt. I had about a tablespoon and a half left, which is the perfect amount for starter, so I soaked what was left of the salted cashews with the same amount of salted pistachios, then several hours later blended the nuts with the diluted yogurt, now starter. It is currently sitting on my kitchen window sill, and I have a feeling it will be just fine. Why cashews and pistachios? Primarily because the only other nut I had was walnuts, and that's something my husband can't eat. 

Cashew-pistachio yogurt, which I swear tastes better than it sounds

 

About six weeks ago my husband and I got a big box of tea from the Algerian grocery store at Haymarket, and quickly realized that the tea was too bitter. I had also ordered some Scottish tea (among other things) from Adagio Tea, which my husband liked much better but which he felt guilty about using too much of while we had to slog through the bitter tea. Because I could not stand to look at a quart and a half of tea that neither of us really liked for too long, a few weeks ago I decided it was time to crank up the kombucha and chai machines again. 

The chai recipe I use is essentially the recipe from How Not To Die: six cups of water plus however much fresh ginger, cinnamon stick, cloves, peppercorns, cardamon, and tumeric you want, plus some ground dried orange powder I made a few weeks ago (dehydrate the orange peel then grind up in your blender). Boil the water and spices for about ten minutes, then turn off the heat and steep one-quarter cup of tea for three minutes (yes, that's a lot of tea, which is why you don't go over three minutes). Most people could use this with an equal amount of milk and a teaspoon or two of sweetener; I usually blend it with a handful of nuts (whatever I have), one or two dates, and an equal amount of water. Hot or iced, it's delicious, and the recipe above will yield about four servings, if you're not overly greedy.

The kombucha recipe I use doesn't differ too much from what everyone else uses. Worthy of note: 1) my starter was a half cup of store-bought kombucha I had a few weeks ago, mixed with some strong tea (possibly re-brewed from some tea my husband had lingering) and a lot of sugar. After a couple of batches, I started wishing for something that wasn't sugar, and then I noticed that my favorite brand (GT) lists kiwi juice in the ingredients, not cane sugar. I couldn't find any frozen juice concentrates that didn't have corn soup (what is wrong with these companies?), so I broke down and bought a bottle of white grape juice (and yes, I verified that it doesn't contain anything but juices). I used this as part of my next starter batch of kombucha, and I was shocked at how much more quickly it fermented. Win!

 

Even in this fuzzy picture, you can see the grape juice-fed SCOBY

...Except that I'm trying to avoid glass bottles, and the juice was also not cheap. Yesterday I picked up a can of organic peaches (and yes, I verified again that it only contained fruit and juice), and when I was contemplating what I could make with the peaches and how I could reuse the juice syrup, it occurred to me that this would be a perfect substitute for grape juice. So woo hoo! I'll let you know how this turns out.

One more thing about the kombucha: using a tip Jack Monroe left on their Twitter account, I purchased some "blueberry nectar" when I got the grape juice. My final step with kombucha is to separate it from the SCOBY and let it ferment with about a cup of juice mixed in for a day or so. It is SO good with blueberry! I'm wondering now if I can use another batch of diluted canned fruit juice, or blended canned fruit...?

 

Blueberry kombucha, which tastes as good as it sounds

 

While I puzzle that out, I'm going to celebrate tonight by making a vegan quiche in the gf pie crust. I am SO excited to make a simple tofu pie since for so long I couldn't eat one. And I'll also make the long-promised Thai tofu curry since the coconut milk and Thai curry paste are staring at me (pretty much from the same place the squash was). It's the little things that make life good.

Deb in the City

Cook Through Your Anxiety!

That will totally be the title of a self-help book in the next two or three years. Don't worry, I have no intention of writing it.

Thinking about food, as I did in my last post, makes me think about food, and on Monday night I took a close look at what I had in my pantry, refrigerator, and freezer. I couldn't even face my over-stuffed spice shelves, and what I had was SO. MUCH. that I'm not going to list out everything. Just know that it was A LOT, and even after going on a cooking binge, it's still enough that I don't need to go shopping for almost a month (but don't worry, that didn't stop me -- more below).

I came up with no less than seventeen recipes that I could make without having to go shopping. When I say I could eat for a month, I wasn't kidding. On Tuesday, feeling anxious about my sons' food issues, the upcoming election, poverty, the environment, and pretty much everything else, I made: vegan, gluten-free sourdough bread (in my Instapot, no less), chocolate beet cake, tomato sauce, vegan chili, and lentil soup. That's just me cracking my knuckles -- seriously, I have twelve more dishes to go -- and the fact that I needed to do some homeschooling and other general parenting. The latter included a phone call with the nutritionist, during which it was decided that they both need a lot more protein. So, budget conscious though I'm trying to be, I spent more money than I'd like to confess to on animal protein sources. As I watched my husband and son devour one-fifth of what we'd spent in one sitting, I started to wonder if the mathematics of better food needed fewer times really works out when you're talking about two growing boys. 

 

I think even this picture is giving a good idea of the awesome texture of the cake and the for-real red velvet color.

(I'm making meat for my sons because they need it. And before someone wants to get on me for not giving them vegan sources of protein, please know that one of the things that seems to be bothering them is, yep, beans. Soyfoods, probably because of the fermented nature, seem to be bothering them less, but that's not cutting it for their growth. Before you say at least give them vegetarian options, they both have issues with dairy and one of them has issues with eggs. And to anyone who wants to argue that their growth and general health isn't worth what I'm feeding them, we don't have anything to discuss.)

Perhaps you'll be surprised to hear that stress-cooking doesn't actually make your stress go away. To really burn through stress, I need to move around, but I was confined to my home both Monday and Tuesday. By the time I got back from shopping I was ready to jump out of my skin, but then I found that my body bars (36 and 15 pounds) had arrived much earlier than I'd thought. Woo hoo! As soon as my husband cut them out of the boxes for me I did what I had been promising myself I'd do: deadlifts and squats (36 pounds) and overhead presses (15 pounds). Oh, my! You know how your body can just scream for something it hasn't gotten for a while? That's how I've been feeling for a very long time, but when I picked up those bars, the delicious ache in my muscles told me that it was finally getting what it needed. 

With the prayer that I will be able to avoid food shopping for, I don't know, a week, I attacked the kitchen this morning, making chicken soup stock and then chicken soup. (Did I mention we roasted a chicken last night? It happened.) After a little calculus and chemistry with the boys -- highlight of my day, I kid you not -- I think I'm going back for vegan, gluten-free mac and cheese and squash pudding. Or we'll see what else we can come up with that I can fit in the fridge.

Off to make someone an egg and vegan cheese sandwich on gluten-free bread,

Deb in the City

Dogged by food, again

One of the consequences of ongoing toxic stress that no one tells you about are digestive failures, and not just something as well known as IBS. It was during the, well, decade that I was living through hell that I developed a number of nasty sensitivities. While I can eat soy and sesame now, wheat is still off the table. (Dairy is as well, but that's down to straight up lactose intolerance.)

Things are better, though not always good (which is why I'm drafting this at 1:28 AM), and I thought I could finally rejoin the eco-conscious food system and buy farm-fresh produce for my family, and focus on things like zero-waste. Well, no.

Let's call COVID-19 "stressful", and for many of us, let's call it toxic. Fair to say that teens are suffering from that even more than adults are. My teens are, and they both manifested some extreme digestive symptoms. After consulting a nutritionist for both, we got some blood work done. One of them was relatively straight-forward -- as expected, don't even look at dairy and wheat, and tomatoes and beans are iffy -- but for the most part, he can eat within relatively normal parameters. I fully expected that his brother would be less dramatic, but I was wrong.

My other son showed up highly sensitive for the vast majority of what he was tested for. FYI, "vast majority" includes not only wheat and dairy, but also beef, chicken, eggs, pork, and most fruits and vegetables. I want to say that pretty much everything he's eaten showed up as something he was sensitive to, but that's not entirely correct as tea, coffee, and chocolate are all things that he's just fine for. 

 

Who doesn't love lasagna? Now all I have to do is make this with gluten free pasta, vegan cheese and meat, and figure out a tomato-free substitute for the sauce...

I spoke to another healthcare provider the day after I got the results, and her perspective was that his (and maybe both of their) immune systems need to be strengthened, and he should have small amounts of the foods he's sensitive to in the meantime. Confining him to a narrow set of food choices is going to add more stress, both physical and mental. That was the conclusion I had started to come to as well: if the food wasn't killing him, I wasn't going to take it away. (Please note, these are food sensitivity results, not allergies. I do not advise anyone to be as blithe with things that could cause anaphylactic shock.)

All of this came to a head as we had an order of farm fresh food waiting to be picked up, which I knew included things both of my sons had shown sensitivities to. Even with a more relaxed attitude, I can't help but wonder what the point is of going out of my way to get premium farm fresh produce (and meats) when my sons can't eat that much of it. Or does that mean that there's even more of a point to it?

Around this time I also found that my favorite food blogger, Jack Monroe, was posting again. Seems for now they've tightened their belt even more (Brexit is rearing it's ugly head in so many ways), and as they're cheerfully shopping for two on a weekly budget of $25.82 (the current equivalent of 20 pounds), I'm wondering how well they would cope if their family members were diagnosed with the same level of sensitivities to things like wheat and dairy. (Let's pretend that people on that tight a budget can access a test like that in the first place.) Actually, I don't have to wonder, because I've been in similar straits myself. The answer for me was to suffer through the things I was sensitive to because I didn't have a choice. I don't think I'm the only parent who has had to make that decision for themselves, and it's horrible. But having to make that decision for your children is the worst. It is also extremely -- wait for it -- stressful, which exacerbates everything and keeps you cycling through your vicious circle. My hat is off to Monroe and anyone else who can continue through that and power through.

Not sure this makes me feel better or worse about the farm order, but for now I've suspended it. It doesn't make sense right now to order something four days in advance, not knowing who will be sensitive to what. This feels like the right decision for me right now, but I can't but feel like I'm part of the problem now.

Deb in the City